The Noahide Laws to Decapitate Christians & The History of FEMA

Keep in mind:

–H.J.Res.104– H.J.Res.104 One Hundred Second Congress of the United States of America
AT THE FIRST SESSION

Begun and held at the City of Washington on Thursday, the third day of January, one thousand nine hundred and ninety-one Joint Resolution

To designate March 26, 1991, as `Education Day, U.S.A.’.

Whereas Congress recognizes the historical tradition of ethical values and principles which are the basis of civilized society and upon which our great Nation was founded;

Whereas these ethical values and principles have been the bedrock of society from the dawn of civilization, when they were known as the Seven Noahide Laws;

Whereas without these ethical values and principles the edifice of civilization stands in serious peril of returning to chaos; Whereas society is profoundly concerned with the recent weakening of these principles that has resulted in crises that beleaguer and threaten the fabric of civilized society;

Whereas the justified preoccupation with these crises must not let the citizens of this Nation lose sight of their responsibility to transmit these historical ethical values from our distinguished past to the generations of the future; Whereas the Lubavitch movement has fostered and promoted these ethical values and principles throughout the world;

Whereas Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, leader of the Lubavitch movement, is universally respected and revered and his eighty-ninth birthday falls on March 26, 1991;

Whereas in tribute to this great spiritual leader, `the rebbe’, this, his ninetieth year will be seen as one of `education and giving’, the year in which we turn to education and charity to return the world to the moral and ethical values contained in the Seven Noahide Laws; and

Whereas this will be reflected in an international scroll of honor signed by the President of the United States and other heads of state: Now, therefore, be it

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That March 26, 1991, the start of the ninetieth year of Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, leader of the worldwide Lubavitch movement, is designated as `Education Day, U.S.A.’. The President is requested to issue a proclamation calling upon the people of the United States to observe such day with appropriate ceremonies and activities.

Speaker of the House of Representatives. Vice President of the United States and President of the Senate.

“IT IS IN FACT, THE LUBAVITCH JEWISH MOVEMENT OF WHICH THE NWO IS BASED”

NOAHIDE LAWS, Decapitation for Confessing “JESUS IS LORD”

The Jewish Encyclopedia envisages a Noahide regime as a possible world order immediately preceding the universal reign of the Talmud.

It has to be understood that we are not dealing with the Noah of the Bible when the religion of Judaism refers to “Noahide law,” but the Noahide law as understood and interpreted by the absolute system of falsification that constitutes the Talmud.

Under the Talmud’s counterfeit Noahide Laws, the worship of Jesus is forbidden under penalty of death, since such worship of Christ is condemned by Judaism as idolatry. Meanwhile various forms of incest are permitted under the Talmudic understanding of the Noahide code. (Enziklopediya Talmudit, note 1, pp. 351-352).

The Talmud also states the penalty for disobedience: “One additional element of greater severity is that violation of any one of the seven laws subjects the Noahide to capital punishment by decapitation. (Sanh. 57A)”

(Talmud – Sukkah 52a). With the end of free will, the opportunity to earn reward and enhance one’s portion in the World to Come will also cease — forever.

Rv:20:4: And I saw thrones, and they sat upon them, and judgment was given unto them: and I saw the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the word of God, and which had not worshipped the beast, neither his image, neither had received his mark upon their foreheads, or in their hands; and they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years.

Maimonides Mishnah Torah, in Chapter 10 of the English Translation, states concerning Jesus Christ:

“It is a mitzvah [religious duty; ARC], however, to eradicate Jewish traitors, minnim, and apikorsim, and to cause them to descend to the pit of destruction, since they cause difficulty to the Jews and sway the people away from God, as did Jesus of Nazareth and his students, and Tzadok, Baithos, and their students. May the name of the wicked rot.” 6.And WHO Supports This?

George Bush, indicated in Public Law 102-14, 102nd Congress, that the United States of America was founded upon the Seven Universal Laws of Noah

What Are THE SEVEN LAWS OF NOAH?

According to the Pharisees, known today in modern day as Lubavitch Jews, the Noahide Laws are based from their version of the Talmud (Satanic version of the Torah)

let’s take a closer look..

1. Idolatry is forbidden. Man is commanded to believe in the One God alone and worship only Him.

IDOLATRY
–against entertaining the thought that there exists a deity except the Lord (to worship Jesus as the Messiah is blasphemy according to the Talmud and punishable by decapitation).
-against making any graven image (and against having anyone else make one for us)
-against making idols for use by others
-against making any forbidden statues (even when they are for ornamental purposes)
-against bowing to any idol (and not to sacrifice nor to pour libation nor to burn incense before any idol, even where it is not the customary manner of worship to the particular idol)
-against worshipping idols in any of their customary manners of worship
-against causing our children to pass (through the fire) in the worship of Molech.
-against practicing Ov
-against the practice of Yiddoni
-against turning to idolatry (in word, in thought, in deed, or by any observance that may draw us to its worship)

2. Incestuous and adulterous relations are forbidden. Human beings are not sexual objects, nor is pleasure the ultimate goal of life.

ILLICIT INTERCOURSEagainst (a man) having union with his mother
against (a man) having union with his sister
against (a man) having union with the wife of his father
against (a man) having union with another man’s wife
against (a man) copulating with a beast
against a woman copulating with a beast
against (a man) lying carnally with a male
against (a man) lying carnally with his father
against (a man) lying carnally with his father’s brother
against engaging in erotic conduct that may lead to a prohibited union

3. Murder is forbidden. The life of a human being, formed in God’s image, is sacred.

HOMICIDEagainst anyone murdering anyone

4. Cursing the name of God is forbidden. Besides honoring and respecting G-d, we learn from this precept that our speech must be sanctified, as that is the distinctive sign which separated man from the animals.

BLASPHEMYto acknowledge the presence of God
to fear God
to pray to Him
to sanctify God’s name (in face of death, where appropriate)
against desecrating God’s name (even in face of death, when appropriate)
to study the Torah
to honor the scholars, and to revere one’s teacher
against blaspheming

5. Theft is forbidden. The world is not ours to do with as we please.

THEFT
against stealing
against committing robbery
against shifting a landmark
against cheating
against repudiating a claim of money owed
against overcharging
against coveting
against desiring
a laborer shall be allowed to eat of the fruits among which he works (under certain conditions)
against a laborer eating of such fruit (when certain conditions are not met)
against a laborer taking of such fruit home
against kidnapping
against the use of false weights and measures
against the possession of false weights and measures
that one shall be exact in the use of weights and measures
that the robber shall return (or pay for) the stolen object

6. Eating the flesh of a living animal is forbidden. This teaches us to be sensitive to cruelty to animals. (This was commanded to Noah for the first time along with the permission of eating meat. The rest were already given to Adam in the Garden of Eden.)

LIMB OF A LIVING CREATUREagainst eating a limb severed from a living animal, beast, or fowl
against eating the flesh of any animal which was torn by a wild beast … which, in part, prohibits the eating of such flesh as was torn off an animal while it was still alive

7. Mankind is commanded to establish courts of justice and a just social order to enforce the first six laws and enact any other useful laws or customs.

JUSTICEto appoint judges and officers in each and every community
to treat the litigants equally before the law
to inquire diligently into the testimony of a witness
against the wanton miscarriage of justice by the court
against the judge accepting a bribe or gift from a litigant
against the judge showing marks of honor to but one litigant
against the judge acting in fear of a litigant’s threats
against the judge, out of compassion, favoring a poor litigant
against the judge discriminating against the litigant because he is a sinner
against the judge, out of softness, putting aside the penalty of a mauler or killer
against the judge discriminating against a stranger or an orphan
against the judge hearing one litigant in the absence of the other
against appointing a judge who lacks knowledge of the Law
against the court killing an innocent man
against incrimination by circumstantial evidence
against punishing for a crime committed under duress
that the court is to administer the death penalty by the sword
against anyone taking the law into his own hands to kill the perpetrator of a capital crime
to testify in court
against testifying falsely
* This point is disagreed upon by different writers: “The Noahites are not restricted in this way but may judge singly and at once.”
(Note: The Jewish Law, found in Deuteronomy 17:6, requires the testimony of 2 or 3 witnesses before one can be executed. In fact, the last sentence of verse 6 specifically states, “…he shall not be put to death on the evidence of one witness”. This should be our first clue that these seven Noahide Laws are nothing more than a clever counterfeit of God’s Ten Commandments)

This paves the way for the “Lord” to be defined as to who they define as Lord, and those who don’t agree or who refuse to worship their Lord, will be beheaded.

The penalty for violating any of these Noahide Laws is spelled out on page 1192 of the Encyclopedia Judaica, “… violation of any one of the seven laws subjects the Noahide to capital punishment by decapitation.” Wow, in other words, if one person steps forward to accuse a Gentile of violating any one of these seven laws, that testimony alone would be enough to decapitate the accused. A person could be put to death for the flimsy accusation of being cruel to animals, and based on the lying testimony of one person!! Notice, there is no assumption of innocence until proven guilty, nor of the prosecution having to prove their case. No, on the accusation of one person, the accused may be legally decapitated.

Now let’s look at what Cutting Edge revealed about these Noahide Laws:
We have become aware of one more development in the approach of AntiChrist. Before I tell you what this new development is, I feel the need to lay some groundwork of understanding first. Remember, when AntiChrist arises, he shall claim to be the advanced Christ Consciousness which came upon Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammed, in their respective historic period. AntiChrist will also claim to the Jewish Messiah for whom they have been waiting. Peter Lemusier makes it quite clear in his book, The Armageddon Script, that The Christ will have to fulfill all the Old Testament prophecies concerning the appearance of Messiah if he has any hope of deceiving Orthodox Jews. The main point to be grasped is that this False Messiah will claim to be Jewish, and an orthodox Jew at that. He will uphold the ancient Judaic Law and the Talmud. Keeping this information in your mind please consider the following news:

Christian newsletter, “Don Bell Reports“, December 27, 1991, reported that, on March 20, 1991 President Bush signed into law a Congressional Joint Resolution entitled, “A Joint Resolution To Designate March 26, 1991, As Education Day, USA”. This joint resolution became Public Law 102-14. The title seems so innocuous that no one would think twice about it if they happened to just see it; however, this law is very sinister in its implications. It is typical of the New World Order Planners to devise innocent sounding words, phrases, and titles to mask their true intentions.

Public Law 102-14 states emphatically that all civilization from the beginning has been based upon a set of laws entitled “The Seven Noahide Laws”. I bet you did not know this, did you? You probably believed that the Holy Bible was the basis upon which civilization was based. What are “The Seven Noahide Laws” and from whence did they come? These seven supposed universal laws, according to the Encyclopedia Americana, p. 737, state that they are “a Jewish Talmudic designation for seven biblical laws given to Adam and to Noah before the revelation to Moses on Mt. Sinai and consequently, binding upon all mankind.” Don Bell correctly reports that these laws originated from the mystic (and Satanic) Babylonian Talmud, which no Christian has ever accepted as inspired sacred Scripture. In fact, the Talmud is that collection of man-made interpretations of the Pentateuch (Genesis through Deuteronomy) against which Jesus railed so intensely. The Talmud was taught as being equal with God’s inspired Word, even though the practical effect of its teachings were so often the exact opposite of what God had intended.

However, the Encyclopedia Americana continues its explanation of the Noahide Laws, “Throughout the ages, scholars have viewed the Noahide Laws as a link between Judaism and Christianity, as universal norms of ethical conduct, as a basic concept of international law, or as a guarantee of fundamental human rights for all.” This explanation leaves one to believe that both Jews and Gentiles are bound by these seven laws; however, Don Bell reports from Jewish sources that the Jew who lives according to the Torah is exempt from these seven laws. In other words, these seven Noahide Laws were meant for the Gentiles only!! They are meant to be a substitute for the Ten Commandments. At this point, we need to briefly list these seven Noahide Laws.

Thou shalt not engage in idol worship.

Thou shalt not blaspheme God.

Thou shalt not shed innocent blood of a human nor fetus nor ailing person who has a limited time to live.

Thou shalt establish laws and courts of law to administer these laws, including the death penalty for those who kill, administered only if there is one testifying eyewitness (Note: The Jewish Law, found in Deuteronomy 17:6, requires the testimony of 2 or 3 witnesses before one can be executed. In fact, the last sentence of verse 6 specifically states, “…he shall not be put to death on the evidence of one witness”. This should be our first clue that these seven Noahide Laws are nothing more than a clever counterfeit of God’s Ten Commandments).

Thou shalt not be cruel to animals.

The penalty for violating any of these Noahide Laws is spelled out on page 1192 of the Encyclopedia Judaica, “… violation of any one of the seven laws subjects the Noahide to capital punishment by decapitation.” Wow, in other words, if one person steps forward to accuse a Gentile of violating any one of these seven laws, that testimony alone would be enough to decapitate the accused. A person could be put to death for the flimsy accusation of being cruel to animals, and based on the lying testimony of one person!! Notice, there is no assumption of innocence until proven guilty, nor of the prosecution having to prove their case. No, on the accusation of one person, the accused may be legally decapitated.

Now that I have your attention, let us examine further Public Law 102-14, which set the Noahide Laws as the basis for International Law, (read United Nations) to which all American law must conform. This public law singles out one Jewish group for special honor, saying that they embody the principles of these Noahide Laws. This group is the ultra-orthodox Lubavitch Movement, known for its strict adherence to the smallest detail of the Talmud. This group believes their head Rabbi, Menachem Scheerson, is the prophesied Messiah, and are anxiously waiting for him to publicly proclaim his office. This is such a small splinter religious group that very few Americans have ever heard of it; yet, the Congress and the President of the United States have declared in this law that this rabbi is “universally respected and revered” and that his Lubavitch movement has “fostered and promoted these seven Noahide Laws”. Don Bell again sheds much light upon this Lubavitch Movement, when he quotes Rabbi Louis Finkelstein, the head of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in 1943, writing in the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, “Pharisaism became Talmudism…the spirit of the ancient Pharisee survives unaltered. When the Jew studies the Talmud, he is actually repeating arguments used in the Palestinian academies.” In other words, the Talmudic Lubavitchers are reborn Pharisees. Our listeners should immediately be alerted by this revelation, because, on July 17, 1993, we studied the beliefs of the Pharisees and discovered that they were occutlic. Many Pharisees belonged to the Jewish occult group, the Cabal, Satanic through and through. We studied that the Jewish Cabal forms a most important foundational building block upon which the entire New World Order movement is based. Finally, we showed how these Pharisees could hate Jesus Christ so vehemently, even in the face of His tremendous miracles. We understood how Jesus possessed such hatred of the teachings and the hypocrisy of the Pharisees. Once we understand that the Pharisee of Jesus’ day was involved in a Satanic secret society, we can understand how they could hate him so much.

Then, on July 24, we studied how these Pharisees originated the Unpardonable Sin. They viewed the many supernatural miracles of Jesus and believed that He was able to accomplish these miracles because He was an Adept in the Egyptian Mysteries. He could, therefore, access the power of the occult. Jesus warned them not to ascribe His power to Satan, but they continued to do so, thus committing the Unpardonable Sin. To this day, secret societies continue to teach their members that Jesus could do His many miracles because He was an Adept in the occult.

The Pharisees also succeeded in killing Jesus Christ on the basis that He blasphemed God, which is Noahide Law # 2. Remember Jesus’ words, in Matthew 10:24-25, that the disciples of the Master will be treated in just the same way as the Master has been treated. I wonder if this Scripture has any bearing upon this current situation? Public Law 102-14 sets the foundation for American and United Nations Law to be established in such a way as to uphold these Seven Noahide Laws. These seven laws are a counterfeit of the Ten Commandments, and are promoted by the Neo-Pharisee occult group, the Lubavitchers. Don Bell further states that the Lubavitchers are a “Mystic” group, thus signifying that they teach the Cabal as well as the Talmud. This revelation ties them directly into the secret societies of today which are powering the drive into the New World Order, i.e., the Illuminati, the Freemasons, and the Bilderberger Group, just to name a few. Thus, it would seem natural that these secret societies would look favorably upon a Mystic Jewish group, which has its active roots in the ancient Cabal, a group which is a soul-mate to today’s secret societies.

Is Satan setting the stage where Christians could be legally charged with violation of Noahide Law, Number 2, of blaspheming God? Certainly, our doctrine that Jesus Christ is God in the flesh would constitute “blasphemy against God”, just as it did against Jesus. But, our punishment would be decapitation, a much more humane way to die than crucifixion. What does Scripture foretell as to the way in which true Christians will die in the Tribulation Period? Jesus reveals, in Revelation 20:4, that Christians in the Great Tribulation will be beheaded, i.e., decapitated, precisely the method proscribed by the Talmud. This is just one more instance in which the stage is apparently being set for the precise fulfillment of Biblical prophecy.

Whereas Congress recognizes the historical tradition of ethical values and principles which are the basis of civilized society and upon which our, great Nation was founded;

Whereas these ethical values and principles have been the bedrock of society from the dawn of civilization, when they were known as the Seven Noahide Laws;

Whereas without thes ethical values and principles the edifice of civilization stands in serious peril of returning to chaos;

Whereas society is profoundly concerned with the recent weakening of these principles that has resulted in crises that beleaguer and threaten the fabric of civilized society;

Whereas the justified preoccupation with these crises must not let the citizens of this Nation lose sight of their responsibility to transmit these historical ethical values from our distinguished past to the generations of the future;

Whereas the Lubavitch movement has fostered and promoted these ethical values and principles throughout the world;

Whereas Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, leader of the Lubavitch movement, is universally respected and revered and his eighty-ninth birthday falls on March 26, 1991:

Whereas in tribute to this great spiritual leader, “the rebbe”, this, his ninetieth year will be seen as one of “education and giving”, the year in which we turn to education and charity to return the world to the moral and ethical values contained in the Seven Noahide Laws: and

Whereas this will be reflected in an international scroll of honor signed by the President of the United States and other heads of state:

Now, therefore, be it Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That March 26, 1991, the start of the ninetieth year of Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, leader of the worldwide Lutbavitch movement. is designated as “Education Day. U.S.A.”. The President is requested to issue a proclamation calling upon the people of the United States to observe such day with appropriate ceremonies and activities.

Dr. James Wickstrom explains the Noahide Laws that went into effect in 1991 under the cabal’s representative George H. W. Bush. There are hundreds of guillotines stored in US government warehouses waiting to be rolled out to behead Christians who refuse to take the mark of the beast, which we believe is the RFID chip.

An infamous example—The 17th century Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza opposed the tyrannical control of the rabbis over his fellow Jews in the Netherlands. Spinoza was a macher (big shot) in the so-called “Jewish Enlightenment” (the haskalah movement), so a beit din issued a “kill on sight” psak on Spinoza. As a result, a crazed Jewish zealot stabbed Spinoza in the neck. Spinoza was luckier than most; he survived the attack.

FEMA Camp Locations

The Secret History of FEMA

by Garrett M. Graff

Large FEMA trailer park is seen next to the University of New Orleans campus in the Lakeview area August 25, 2006 in New Orleans, LA. Mario Tama/Getty Images

FEMA gets no respect.

Consider: The two men who are supposed to be helping run the federal government’s disaster response agency had a pretty quiet late August. Even as a once-in-a-thousand-year storm barreled into Houston, these two veterans of disaster response—Daniel A. Craig and Daniel J. Kaniewski—found themselves sitting on their hands.

Both had been nominated as deputy administrators in July, but Congress went on its long August recess without taking action on either selection—despite the fact that both are eminently qualified for the jobs.

Leaving the roles open as the annual Atlantic hurricane season arrived was the clearest recent sign that FEMA—an agency whose success or failure translates directly into human suffering avoided or exacerbated—barely registers in Washington.

In fact, FEMA has always been an odd beast inside the government—an agency that has existed far from the spotlight except for the occasional high-stakes appearance during moments of critical need. It can disappear from the headlines for years in between a large hurricane or series of tornadoes.

But FEMA’s under-the-radar nature was originally a feature, not a bug. During the past seven decades, the agency has evolved from a top-secret series of bunkers designed to protect US officials in case of a nuclear attack to a sprawling bureaucratic agency tasked with mobilizing help in the midst of disaster.

The transition has not been smooth, to say the least. And to this day, the agency’s weird history can be glimpsed in its strange mix of responsibilities, limitations, and quirks. And then there’s this fun fact: Along the way, FEMA’s forefathers created a legacy that is too often forgotten. Inside those bunkers during the 1970s, the nation’s emergency managers invented the first online chat program—the forerunner to Slack, Facebook Messenger, and AIM, which have together transformed modern life.

FEMA didn’t start off as FEMA—in fact, it has been reshuffled and reorganized more than perhaps any other key agency in recent US history. Harry Truman started FEMA’s forerunner, the Federal Civil Defense Administration, in 1950. One newspaper columnist at the time had a succinct summation of the new agency’s shortcomings: “The Federal Civil Defense Administration has had no authority to do anything specific, or to make anyone else do it.” Unfortunately it’s a criticism that would continue to ring true, straight through natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina.

Bureaucratic indifference has marked nearly every aspect of the nation’s homeland security operations, a point best indicated by the FCDA’s evolution: Over the following decades, it migrated regularly between different departments and underwent nearly a dozen name changes and agency affiliations before eventually becoming the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the 1970s. After the 9/11 attacks there was yet another organizational reshuffling, and the agency finally ended up part of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003.

Most of these various predecessors to FEMA weren’t all that concerned with civilian natural disasters. They were primarily focused on responding to nuclear war; the evolution to being the first call after a hurricane, flood, or tornado came about in part because it turned out America doesn’t have all that many nuclear wars—and the equipment and supply stockpiles and disaster-response experts at FEMA’s predecessors were useful for something other than the apocalypse.

FEMA was the result of Jimmy Carter’s efforts to restore some primacy to civil defense planning, bringing it back into the spotlight after years of diminishing budgets. The administration threw its weight behind a congressional effort to reestablish what was then known as the Office of Emergency Preparedness under a new name, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, uniting the nation’s disaster response with its planning for “continuity of government,” the secret programs that were supposed to snap into place in the event of nuclear war.

Created in April 1979, FEMA brought together more than 100 programs from across the government; publicly, the agency would be known for coordinating the government’s response to natural disasters like floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes. But few in the public understood that much of FEMA’s resources went instead to its primary mission—coordinating the nation’s post-apocalypse efforts—and that the majority of its funding and a third of its workforce was actually hidden in the nation’s classified black budget. The agency’s real focus and its real budget was known to only 20 members of Congress.

Indeed, FEMA was hobbled from the start, limited by weak central leadership, full of political patrons, and pulled in multiple directions by its disparate priorities—some public, some secret. As one Reagan-era assessment of the agency concluded, “FEMA may well be suffering from a case of too many missions for too few staff and resources.… FEMA itself might be a mission impossible.”

Today, conspiracy theorists fear that FEMA is setting up concentration camps to house political dissidents (Google “FEMA camps” if you want to lose an hour or two in a rabbit hole). The truth is a bit stranger: FEMA, as it turns out, doesn’t construct camps for political dissidents—but it started by taking one over.

The cornerstone of FEMA’s secret world is a bunker in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains that has served as the civilian government’s primary emergency hideaway since the 1950s. Mount Weather’s name comes from its use as a research station and observatory for the Weather Bureau dating back to the 1890s. At the turn of the 20th century, the observatory was known for its pioneering science, using elaborate balloons and box kites to study the atmosphere at a time when meteorology was in its infancy. The nascent Weather Bureau, the forerunner of the National Weather Service, picked the isolated site because it was far away from that era’s cutting-edge technology—electrical trolley lines, whose troublesome electric currents could throw off magnetic observations. “We are looking to the future needs of a rapidly developing and intensely interesting branch of science,” the observatory director explained, “and are trying to build the very best observatory possible.” Using motor-operated rotating steel drums lined with as much as 40,000 feet of piano wire, Mount Weather’s kite team broke its own world altitude record in 1910, flying a kite 23,826 feet into the air and recording the lowest temperature ever (29 degrees Fahrenheit below zero) using a kite-launched instrument.

As meteorology advanced and better technologies arrived, the Weather Bureau handed off the majority of the 100-acre facility to the Army for use as a World War I–era artillery range. The government then spent the better part of the 1920s trying without success to get rid of the property. Later still, beginning in 1936, Mount Weather became a Bureau of Mines facility where the agency tested various boring methods. The rock on the mountain was exceptionally dense, and the bureau began building a narrow but lengthy tunnel into the mountain for experiments on blasting and drilling methods.

During World War II, the government housed as many as 100 conscientious objectors there, pressing them into service as weather researchers to help develop better forecasts for the Northern Hemisphere. After the war, the facility went back to the Bureau of Mines, which redoubled its efforts at developing new boring techniques. In a lengthy 1953 report on the “widely acclaimed” problems solved by the mountain’s engineers, the Interior Department bragged, “From Mount Weather in the last few years has come a mass of technical data on drilling, steels to use in drills and rods, diamond drilling, and related subjects.” Its work on diamond drill bits was considered, well, groundbreaking.

That publication was one of the last public mentions of the site for decades. Even as the Interior report went to press, the government began to slowly expunge the existence of Mount Weather from official mention. The Soviet Union now had atomic weapons; the Cold War was on, and preparations for an all-out nuclear exchange had to be made. Given its distance from Washington, its exceptionally hard rock, the preexisting tunnel, and its pre-located boring machines, Mount Weather was a perfect place to outfit an executive-branch bunker. If the worst happened, the American government could continue to function underground.

Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center in Virginia served as a secret bunker that would house senior US officials in case of a nuclear war. Karen Nutini/FEMA

Beginning in 1954, just a year after the Pentagon’s backup bunker at Raven Rock became operational in Pennsylvania, the Army Corps of Engineers began a four-year expansion project that would transform Mount Weather into the nation’s largest underground complex. “Operation High Point” enlarged the original tunnels, excavating hundreds of thousands of tons of greenstone and hollowing out a cavern large enough for a medium-sized city under the mountain. More than 21,000 iron bolts reinforced the roof. While the facility wasn’t fully completed until 1958, it began serving as the executive branch’s main relocation site almost immediately, hosting Eisenhower’s evacuation drill Operation Alert in 1954. According to a perhaps apocryphal story, the first director of the Mount Weather bunker was given a simple commission directly from President Eisenhower: “I expect your people to save our government.”

By the Kennedy years, Mount Weather included all the amenities and life-support systems of a top-of-the-line bunker: Helicopter landing pads and a sewage treatment plant were atop the mountain, but underneath was where the real facility existed, with underground reservoirs for both drinking water and cooling needs, diesel generators, a hospital, radio and television broadcast facilities, cafeterias, its own fire department and police force. Some 800 blue mesh hammocks sat ready for evacuated personnel, who would sleep in shifts throughout the day. Plastic flowers dotted the tables in the cafeteria.

It was just one of dozens of bunkers and relocation facilities that FEMA’s predecessor agencies built around the country, including what it called Federal Regional Center bunkers in places like Denton, Texas; Maynard, Massachusetts; Thomasville, Georgia; Bothell, Washington; and Denver, Colorado. The Denton center, the first to open in 1964—and still in use today—was a 50,000-square-foot, two-level bunker that could have supported several hundred officials for 30 days. It had its own drinking well, laundry facilities, diesel generators, and 13-ton blast doors. The facility kitchen could have served 1,500 meals a day and its walk-in freezers could double as a morgue. The centers also included duplicates of vital records, to help affected agencies maintain continuity of operations. Any of the facilities could be used by the president or other high-ranking government leaders if they happened to be caught nearby during an attack, and they had broadcast booths ready to connect to the nation’s Emergency Broadcast System.

This elaborate network of national bunkers—and the unique responsibilities they had in hosting US officials after a nuclear attack—made FEMA’s predecessors and the national continuity-of-government program leaders in the developing field of computers and technology. By the early 1970s, Mount Weather and what was then known as the Office of Emergency Preparedness had amassed some of the most sophisticated and cutting-edge computers in the world to help it respond to the complex scenarios of an unfolding attack.

A large specially built bubble-shaped pod inside Mount Weather’s East Tunnel contained several advanced computers, which were disconnected from the network at 9 pm each night so that teams could conduct classified research and computations until 8:30 am the next day. Inside the pod, the room-sized UNIVAC 1108 supercomputer, which retailed for about $1.6 million, represented the cutting-edge technology of multiprocessors, allowing the computer to do multiple functions at once. “I’m at a loss to describe its maximum capacity,” a UNIVAC executive said at the time, awed by the processing power installed at Mount Weather.

Those computers deep inside Mount Weather helped spawn one of modern’s life most transformative technologies.

Murray Turoff was a young PhD graduate from UC Berkeley when he crossed paths, during a NATO conference in the 1960s in Amsterdam, with Norman Dalkey, one of the lead developers on a RAND project known as Project Delphi. Its purpose: to help the government harness group decisionmaking. One evening after the conference sessions were over, the two computer scientists had intended to tour Amsterdam’s famed red-light district, but ended up talking late into the night about the work Turoff was doing on war game simulations. Both men were keenly interested in human collaboration, and Turoff was soon sucked deeper into the government’s secret Doomsday planning operation, joining the Office of Emergency Preparedness to work on collaboration and information sharing. Earlier crisis networks had been frustrating failures; a very primitive one created by the military and US government during the Berlin airlift in the 1940s had been quickly overloaded by the volume of messaging. But by the Nixon years computers had advanced enough to make such communication systems practical.

At OEP, Turoff worked with Dalkey’s Project Delphi team to speed up the expert analysis and harness the knowledge of hundreds of informal and formal presidential advisers on emergency situations. His first crisis wasn’t nuclear; it was Nixon’s August 1971 wage-price freeze, which attempted to pull the nation’s economy out of an inflationary spiral. Under orders to deliver a monitoring network in just a week, Turoff developed a system in just four days that came to be known as the Emergency Management Information System and Reference Index—with the inevitable acronym EMISARI, which allowed 10 regional offices to link together in a real-time online chat, known as the “Party Line.

While the system was meant to work in parallel with the normal OEP conference calls and faxes, Turoff and his team found that EMISARI’s efficiencies quickly outpaced everything else and that the organization’s conversations migrated online quickly. Entries were limited to just 10 lines, to prevent, Turoff recalls, people writing “typical government memos” inside the system.

In the first 10 weeks of the wage-price crisis, the 80 officials on the system turned to EMISARI 900 times to enter data; they exchanged nearly 3,000 messages—a phenomenal rate for the early days of computing. EMISARI proved to be the forerunner of later electronic chat functions like AOL Instant Messenger and text messaging.

The system also included seven master text files that laid out general policies and guidance, a comprehensive list of the actions being taken by headquarters and the various regional offices as well as abstracts of news stories and press releases—all of which could be updated in near real-time and disseminated nationally in an instant.

After its first successful test during the wage freeze, EMISARI and its successor systems became an integral part of OEP’s response to other economic disruptions in the 1970s, like the gasoline shortage and trucker strikes in 1974 and 1979. For an agency tasked with responding to a crisis that could unfold across the country simultaneously, EMISARI represented a huge breakthrough—and one that the regional directors quickly realized would be critical in continuity operations. “A conferencing capability would be highly useful under [a nuclear attack scenario], particularly during the transattack and immediate post-attack period when everybody would have to be holed up and face-to-face conferences would be impossible,” said EMISARI’s project manager, Richard Wilcox.

By 1974, a system for quickly gathering and storing important data was also emerging. As Wilcox explained: “Access to the national resource database and associated nuclear damage estimation models could support analysts attempting to figure out what could be done with what was left after a nuclear attack.”

In fact, EMISARI was an integral part of the growing number of computerized resources that the Office of Emergency Preparedness was building into its facilities like Mount Weather to serve as the backbone of the nation’s crisis response systems. Two other major components of the OEP’s “Civil Crisis Management” system were its “Contingency Impact Analysis System” (CIAS) and its “Resource Interruption Monitoring System” (RIMS), which were meant to help officials respond to critical shortages and to shuffle much-needed resources around the country to respond to unfolding situations.

The systems had preprogrammed crisis scenarios, each of which had clearly delineated steps and notified each stakeholder in turn as their role became critical; for the time, it was very advanced networking technology, containing early versions of what later generations would recognize as email, bulletin boards, and chat functionality. “The computer as a device to allow a human group to exhibit collective intelligence is a rather new concept,” Turoff said presciently in 1976. “Over the next decades, attempts to design computerized conference structures that allow a group to treat a particular complex problem with a single collective brain may well promise more benefit for mankind than all the artificial intelligence work to date.”

As tech historian Howard Rheingold has written, EMISARI, RIMS, ARPANet, and similar efforts were a major leap forward in information processing. By grouping and processing messages around given subject matter, the scientists and engineers “were all discovering something that had been unknown in previous communication media—the content of the message is capable of also being an address. Far from being a tool of dehumanization, the computer conferencing system could boost everybody’s ability to contact a community of common interest.”

The advanced computers also greatly improved the continuity of government programs’ war gaming scenarios, allowing much more sophisticated modeling of how the nation would respond in the hours following a nuclear attack. “Once we’re briefed, we’re given two hours to develop a strategy or plan of action,” explained one official who played a Cabinet secretary during an exercise at Mount Weather. “The decision of each department is fed into a computer and the display consoles tell us whether our choices had improved the situation or created new problems.”

OEP and its successor, FEMA, carefully collected data, including latitude and longitude, on more than more 2 million structures across the country that it planned to monitor in the event of a nuclear attack—everything from 10,873 grain silos to 8,184 hospitals, not to mention the 316 mines and caves it had scouted over the preceding decades that could be used to house industrial manufacturing and processes in the wake of a nuclear war. Nearly every conceivable statistic had been carefully calculated and stored for later retrieval; a 6,000-megaton attack on the US, for instance, would destroy much more of the production of alcohol and tobacco products than the population itself, meaning that after a war, liquor and cigarettes would require “drastic rationing.” By completing the calculations in advance, government planners would be able to begin to calculate survival rates even when the attack was still underway, although it was difficult to know how accurate the results would turn out to be. “We’ve never had a war to calibrate the programs,” one official explained in the 1980s.

If there were a nuclear war, FEMA would be the first to know. And it had a chillingly rational plan for responding. Through the Cold War, its watch center in Olney, Maryland, ran daily drills of its radio and telephone systems at 1:15 pm and at 1:30 pm. Had the military detected the start of a nuclear war, one of the two FEMA officers at the agency’s National Warning Center inside the NORAD bunker at Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, would have activated a special dedicated AT&T party line and announced the threat: “Alternate National Warning Center, I have an emergency message.”

“Authenticate,” the watch officer at FEMA’s alternate facility in Olney would have challenged. The authentication codewords for the system were distributed in a red envelope every three months to all the users of the emergency broadcast system; codewords were generally two- or three-syllable words, two for every day of the year—one for the activation of a warning, one for the termination of a warning.

Then, following the NORAD watch officer providing the correct authentication code, the Olney’s watch officer would activate the national alert—bells would sound at Mount Weather and all 10 regional FEMA headquarters, as well as at 400 other federal facilities and more than 2,000 local and state “warning points,” such as emergency 911 dispatch centers. Each warning point would hear the same message: “Attention all stations. This is the National Warning Center. Emergency. This is an Attack Warning. Repeat. This is an Attack Warning.”

The FEMA watch officers would also activate a separate system to announce the attack to the national media, radio, and television broadcast networks—breaking into national programming with the alert. Similar alerts would go out from the FAA to all airborne pilots, from NOAA on the national weather radio network, and from the Coast Guard to mariners afloat. Some of the nation’s warning systems were more unconventional: A plexiglass-shielded Button No. 13 in the DC mayor’s emergency command center, at 300 Indiana Avenue NW, just a few blocks from the US Capitol, would activate “Emerzak,” seizing control of the city’s entire “Muzak” network, replacing the piped-in bossa nova of the city’s elevators, lobbies, medical offices, and department stores with emergency instructions.

Yet even after all that effort, it wasn’t clear how much difference the warnings would make to most of the public. “The people who hear them will run into buildings and be turned to sand in a few seconds anyway,” explained Lieutenant Robert Hogan, New York’s deputy head of civil defense, in 1979.

But the warning would have made a big difference to one of FEMA’s other secret tasks: Figuring out the highest federal official still alive after an attack and designating that person President of the United States.

Beginning during the Cold War and continuing up to the present day, FEMA’s Central Locater System tracks the whereabouts of all the officials who are in the presidential line of succession, 24 hours a day, ensuring the government is ready to whisk them away from their regular lives at a moment’s notice. They work closely with a special team of Air Force helicopter pilots who practice in the skies over Washington daily, ready to drop onto helipads, well-groomed lawns, the National Mall, and even sports fields if necessary, to ensure the survival of those chosen few.

In April 1980 President Carter’s White House Military Office instituted new procedures with FEMA to monitor the attendance of all presidential successors “at major, publicly announced functions outside the White House complex.” While such gatherings of the US leadership had been commonplace in the past—at inaugurations, States of the Union, state funerals, and the like—the rising tensions of the Cold War made continuity-of-government planners questions their wisdom. “The situation provides an inviting target to enemy attack or terrorist activity, and represents an unnecessary risk to national leadership,” the White House Military Office wrote, outlining the new procedures.

When such gatherings seemed imminent, FEMA was to notify the White House and the assistant to the president for national security affairs would recommend to the president which successor should skip the event and serve as the designated survivor. The Central Locator System tracked the whereabouts of the successors daily, and once a month, after the fact, audited a single day to determine whether it had correctly known where each Cabinet member was. The new White House and FEMA procedures got their first test at Reagan’s inaugural—and it’s a protocol that continues to the present day.

While government officials would have been rushed by helicopter to Mount Weather, FEMA also devoted extensive planning in the 1980s to scout where the civilian population would live after a nuclear attack, embarking on a top-secret effort with the FBI known as Project 908 (or “Nine Naught Eight,” as it was called) to map the nation’s commercial buildings for possible refugee resettlement—all part of a larger 1980s program, known as Crisis Relocation Planning, that calculated how to evacuate the nation’s major cities.

Project 908 saw FBI agents, working effectively undercover for FEMA, detailing large warehouses, automobile facilities, Masonic temples, Elks lodges, casinos, camp sites, Coca-Cola bottling plants, Indian bingo halls, country inns, furniture stores, and other potential relocation facilities. In Arkansas, agents lined up a meeting with Walmart executives to discuss using the company’s huge stores for Project 908, explaining as a cover that they wanted to learn crisis management techniques from companies that had large centralized leadership. Denver agents dismissed a closed Coors brewing plant in Colorado because the caretaker was “loose-mouthed.” Meanwhile, in Redding, California, 160 miles north of the state capital, FBI agents approached the owner of Viking Skate Country (“Redding’s fun center for kids!”), known to the government as “Sacramento Site #34,” and outlined their proposal. The owner responded enthusiastically, telling agents he was a “fiercely loyal American” and would “cooperate fully.”

FBI agents presented cooperating business owners with secret agreements to “rent” their facilities for nuclear war. Lengthy addendums to the contracts outlined required utility and infrastructure upgrades needed to support crisis operations, the costs of which were fully paid by the government, as were separate telephone lines installed at each facility. The government also paid a token annual fee on the order of $1,000 or $2,500 to ease cooperation. During an emergency, the FBI would also pay a daily fee for each day it occupied the facility. Nowhere was any government agency other than the FBI mentioned—FEMA kept its fingerprints far from the program.

Under the Crisis Relocation Plan, nearly 150 million Americans—out of the country’s then total population of 225 million—would be evacuated out of 400 “high-risk” cities into smaller surrounding towns and these preselected buildings; under FEMA’s estimates, some 65 percent of that population could be evacuated in as little as one day and fully 95 percent could be evacuated in three days. Such strategic warning, FEMA estimated, would be achievable under most circumstances, since it was “more likely that [a nuclear attack] would follow a period of intense international tension.”

Under FEMA’s plans, the agency had a multistage effort for informing civilians about how best to evacuate. First would come “Protection in the Nuclear Age,” a 25-minute bilingual film produced in 1978 that would air across the country, outlining the threat—and the hope. Copies of the film were distributed in advance to civil defense officials and some television stations, and 15 prewritten newspaper articles distributed by FEMA covered much of the same ground.

The low-tech film featured only illustrations and animations of stick figures—no live action—because by the 1970s civil defense planners had grown tired of retaping propaganda films every time fashion or car styles changed. As one FEMA official explained, “Stick figures don’t get obsolete.” The film tried to put an optimistic spin on nuclear war, providing hope and underscoring that survival was not only possible but—with planning—probable. “Defense Department studies show that even under the heaviest possible attack, less than 5 percent of our entire land mass would be affected by blast and heat from nuclear weapons,” the film’s narrator explained, as red flashes exploded across the United States.

As the film closed the narrator warned, “The greatest danger is hopelessness, the fear that nuclear attack would mean the end of our world. So why not just give up, lie down, and die? That idea could bring senseless and useless death to many, for protection is possible. And your own chances of survival will be much greater if you remember these facts about Protection in the Nuclear Age.”

Then would come detailed evacuation instructions: FEMA would distribute millions of preprinted brochures, perhaps going door to door or perhaps by distributing it with local newspapers. They also took out ads in local telephone books. “As the crisis intensifies and evacuation appears imminent, if you have a vacation cabin or relatives or friends outside the Risk Area, but within a safe distance, go there as soon as possible,” the brochures explained.

Together, FEMA estimated the multimedia campaign would boost survival rates by 8 to 12 percent. All told, FEMA officials during the Reagan years were surprisingly optimistic about nuclear Armageddon. “You know, it’s an enormous gigantic explosion,” FEMA’s head of civil defense, William Chipman, said in one interview. “But it’s still an explosion and just as if a shell went off down the road, you’d rather be lying down than sitting up, and you’d rather be in a foxhole than lying down. It’s the same thing.”

Nationally, FEMA estimated that the efforts, given three or four days warning, would save about 80 to 85 percent of the US population—roughly 15 to 20 percent of the population, planners estimated, would die simply because they refused to evacuate or because they couldn’t evacuate, “the sick, the disabled, and handicapped, people with mental problems, alcoholics, drug addicts, and some of the elderly lonely.”

Even the evacuation of major cities like New York City were carefully planned. “Nobody’s suggesting you could move New York City in 15 minutes. That’s stupid,” Reagan’s FEMA chief, Louis Giuffrida, explained. “But we could do New York if we had a plan in place; we could do New York in five days, a week.”

However impractical in reality, there was no faulting the level of detail of the 152-page plan for evacuating New York, which included both a primary plan and 11 alternatives. Each of the five boroughs would rely on different transit modes to evacuate over the course of precisely 3.3 days. Everyone was to flee to “host areas” within 400 miles of the Big Apple. The per-hour capacity of each road out of New York had been carefully calculated; prepositioned bulldozers would help ensure smooth travel, quickly removing disabled automobiles. More than 4.8 million “carless” New Yorkers would be evacuated by subway, train, ferry, barge, cruise ship, and by civilian and commercial aircraft, as well as by more than 20,000 bus trips. Some 75,000 Manhattan residents would travel up the Hudson to Saratoga using three round-trips of five requisitioned Staten Island ferries. Another 300,000 Manhattan residents would travel by subway to Hoboken and be loaded into boxcars for the trip to upstate New York near Syracuse.

As evacuees were flooding into their new “host area,” construction crews—some of them made up of paroled prisoners—would be hard at work transforming the preidentified buildings into fallout shelters, boarding up windows as dump trucks delivered load after load of dirt, and bulldozers and front-end loaders piled the dirt up against the walls; work crews were to spread dirt over building roofs to the required depth using forklifts or bucket brigades. Extensive surveys, physical inventories, and “cubic yards per hour” calculations by FEMA and its predecessors had shown that most parts of the country possessed sufficient heavy equipment to construct and fortify adequate shelters within the three-day time window

Each host area was expected to absorb five times its normal peacetime population in evacuees and, after registering, all evacuees would be directed to and housed in the various government, community, or commercial buildings identified by the FBI in Project 908. Local families in the “host areas” were to be encouraged to take in relocated strangers as well. “Your neighbors who have evacuated their homes need your help,” FEMA’s preprinted literature explained. “Volunteer now to bring a family to live with you

For those who weren’t adopted and lived inside the shelters, conditions were expected to be tight. The plans called for evacuees to sleep alternating head to toe, “the best position for sleep, in that it decreases the spread of respiratory ailments,” explained FEMA’s comprehensive 1981 guide “How To Manage Congregate Lodging Facilities and Fallout Shelters.” Family groups would be placed in the middle of each shelter, with unmarried men and women separated on either side to encourage “high social standards, particularly for sexual behavior.”

In an emergency, the US government intended to pay for all the food and supplies necessary to shelter and feed evacuees across the country—all told about $2 billion a day—although the money might not be available immediately, so private businesses “must maintain complete and accurate records to justify claims submitted after the Crisis Relocation emergency.” Stores, medical facilities, laundries, and other vital necessities would be kept open in host areas for a minimum of 16 hours a day, to ease access, and most would operate 24 hours a day—after all, there wouldn’t be any shortage of available labo.

Many local leaders were understandingly dubious of the FEMA plans—even on paper they seemed difficult to coordinate and implement. In October 1982, as the autumn foliage began to turn in the Green Mountains, local officials from Connecticut journeyed north to Vermont to familiarize themselves with the locations where 653,000 residents of the Nutmeg State would evacuate if plans were activated. In an evacuation, designated local leaders from each “high risk area,” like city council members or county commissioners, would be dispatched to the “host areas” to form provisional joint governments to oversee evacuees and host areas.

Across the state line in New Hampshire, locals in Barrington looked at the pitched roof of their congregational church, some 40 feet off the ground, and wondered exactly how Washington bureaucrats expected them to bury the church under a foot of dirt to provide the adequate fallout protection required for a portion of the 8,900 residents of Monroe, Connecticut, who would be housed in the small town in an emergency. “Damned foolishness,” one local said. And what happened if the nuclear attack came during the roughly one-third of the year when the ground was frozen solid? You couldn’t exactly dig up the dirt then.

As the Cold War ended in the late 1990s, some of FEMA’s deepest secrets leaked into public view. The Washington Post’s Ted Gup broke the news that the agency ran a massive relocation bunker for Congress, hidden underneath the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia. The facility had meeting rooms for the House and the Senate, a cafeteria, medical facilities, and dormitories so elaborately stocked that they even included the prescription eyeglasses for members of Congress. As the Post story ran, the secret FEMA front company that ran the bunker—Forsythe Associates, which purported to be the audiovisual technicians for the resort—rushed to remove the bunker’s small arsenal of weapons: racks of M-16 rifles, M-60 machine guns, and a small contingent of grenade launchers that could have equipped a light infantry platoon. When one Greenbrier executive asked why they were taking away the weapons cache, the head of Forsythe explained that FEMA feared congressional officials would descend on the facility to inspect it—and then raise the obvious question about how FEMA intended to use such weaponry on US soil.

In fact, peacetime operations didn’t come naturally to FEMA. For the Cold War, it had created a special mobile command centers, known as Mobile Emergency Response Support (MERS) units—eventually building some 300 special vehicles and stationing them across the country at its regional facilities. It tried to repurpose them for natural disasters. Following Hurricane Andrew in 1992, FEMA dispatched MERS units to help the residents of hard-hit Homestead, Florida, but found the vehicles were too high-tech to be of much use—the souped-up tractor-trailers could communicate on encrypted channels with military forces around the world but lacked the basic hand-held radios and telephones necessary to communicate with first responders down the street.

US President Bill Clinton, (R), with FEMA Director James Lee Witt, (L), tour a neighborhood hit by the tornado in Birmingham, AL, April 1998. STEPHEN JAFFE/Getty Images

Its inadequate response to those public disasters made it an easy target for attack. And the critics were blunt: After FEMA fumbled its response to Hurricane Hugo slammed South Carolina in 1988, US Senator Fritz Hollings had labeled FEMA “the sorriest bunch of bureaucratic jackasses I’ve ever known.” A year later, after it bungled the response to the Loma Prieta earthquake that disrupted baseball’s World Series in San Francisco, Representative Norm Mineta declared that FEMA could “screw-up a two-car parade.

The agency’s history as a dumping ground for political patronage did little to help its reputation—just as predecessor civil defense agencies had been parking lots for presidential friends and one-time governors, FEMA had nearly 10 times the normal proportion of political appointees.

In the wake of 1992’s Hurricane Andrew, as FEMA stubbornly waited three days to provide aid to a devastated Florida until officials had filed the correct paperwork, Dade County’s head of emergency preparedness called a press conference and begged, “Where the hell is the cavalry on this one? We need food. We need water. We need people. For God’s sake, where are they?” By the end of President George H.W. Bush’s administration, FEMA was widely seen as the most incompetent agency in the US government. Other government workers labeled it the “turkey farm.

To reform the agency, President Bill Clinton brought in an old friend—like so many of his predecessors—but that friend turned out to be perhaps FEMA’s most effective leader in its history. James Lee Witt seemed perhaps an odd fit at first. A Skoal-dipping son of a farmer who became known in the capital for his ostrich-skin boots and Southern drawl, he had never graduated from college, but he had a forceful personality and a strong background in emergency management from Arkansas. In short order Witt reshuffled nearly 80 percent of the agency’s senior leadership. FEMA streamlined its public mission to just four priorities that would become familiar hallmarks in the years ahead: mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. Witt launched a public relations campaign on Capitol Hill to reassure representatives and senators that their states would get the help they needed.

Quietly, the agency had mothballed relocation sites and put into standby many of its nuclear war preparations—or repurposed them to deal with natural disasters. FEMA updated the MERS command posts to be useful for civilian emergencies and deployed 43 of them to help communications during massive flooding in the Midwest. Even some of FEMA’s fifth-floor at its headquarters near the National Mall, where the classified continuity of government plans were run, was opened up to other projects. Between 1993 and 1994, FEMA’s classified budget dropped from more than $100 million to just $7.5 million as Witt transferred many of its cold war programs into general disaster preparedness efforts.

Meanwhile, the agency was getting downright innovative as well as effective. As part of its response to the Los Angeles earthquake in 1994, it distributed assistance forms right in the daily Los Angeles Times to ensure as many people as possible could access help quickly. And to help boost FEMA’s visibility and power within the federal government, Clinton had promoted FEMA to Cabinet status—meaning it reported directly to the Oval Office.

By the time George W. Bush took over the White House, FEMA had the highest public approval ratings it had ever had—and was publicly known primarily as a natural disaster response agency. “He’s taken a very positive attitude toward the workers,” Leo Bosner, a former FEMA union president said of Witt. “He has focused us on the hazards we face—earthquakes, fires—rather than on what we should do when the bombs start flying.” But for those who knew where to look, FEMA’s continuity of government capabilities had continued to chug along, out of sight. The agency manual, version 1010.1, laid out the responsibilities for its two most generic and innocuous divisions—the Special Programs Division and the Program Coordination Division, the two wings of FEMA that continued to run its secret continuity operations.

In the Blue Ridge Mountains, the FEMA staff continued to keep watch at Mount Weather right through 9/11, when the facility suddenly seemed newly relevant—and Air Force helicopters descended on the mountain, ferrying the congressional leadership and other high-level officials to the bunker.

Just how little had been invested in FEMA was evident inside the agency that day: As the Central Locator System began to track down the presidential successors, it was relying upon Zenith Z-150 computers from the early 1980s.

After overcoming initial communication and response hiccups in the hours and days after 9/11, FEMA eventually earned high marks for the nearly $9 billion in aid it plowed into the New York region. In the wake of the attacks, the White House recruited Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge to launch an Office of Homeland Security, the first step toward the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002. The new department took control of 22 far-flung agencies—from the Treasury’s Customs Service and Secret Service to the Transportation Department’s TSA and Coast Guard to other bodies like FEMA—creating a $36 billion behemoth with nearly a quarter million employees.

The resulting reorganization was the largest government restructuring since the beginning of Cold War when the National Security Act of 1947 had created the modern Pentagon, the CIA, and other entities. The thinking was that by bringing together so many resources focused on domestic security, emergency planning, preparedness, and intelligence, the nation would be more secure and, in a phrase that became a DHS buzzword, more “resilient.” While the Cabinet department—which officially launched on March 1, 2003, with Ridge as its first secretary—was new, DHS was in many ways just the modern incarnation of the Department of Civil Defense that had been advocated by various committees and officials since the 1950s.

Bush’s first FEMA head, Joe Allbaugh, had argued strongly against including FEMA in DHS, believing that having it report directly to the president helped ensure its capability and authority in a disaster—rearranging the deck chairs threatened all the progress the agency had made over the previous decade. But the original plan for placing FEMA inside DHS had been compelling—the 25-year-old agency would become larger, stronger, and more robust, by combining its existing resources with related offices from the Justice Department and the FBI, as well as the Department of Health and Human Service’s National Disaster Medical System. But none of that happened as planned, and the FEMA that became a component of DHS was actually weaker than it had been as a standalone agency.

The DHS reorganization devastated employee morale and cost FEMA its coveted direct access to the president as it was subsumed into a new Cabinet department. The General Accounting Office had warned against the move, saying, “Concerns have been raised that with the emphasis on terrorism preparedness in the aftermath of September 11th, the transfer of FEMA to DHS may result in decreased emphasis on mitigation of natural hazards. Opponents of the FEMA transfer, such as a former FEMA director [James Lee Witt], said that activities not associated with homeland security would suffer if relocated to a large department dedicated essentially to issues of homeland security.

Within two years of DHS’s creation, that fear came true.

The new focus on terrorism preparedness led FEMA to pour resources into its secret continuity planning—including taking some steps so blindingly obvious that it seemed horrifying that they hadn’t been taken already. In December 2003 FEMA put 300 of its staff through a little-publicized exercise known as QUIET STRENGTH, where its emergency group relocated to Mount Weather. It was the first time that FEMA had ever run a full exercise of even its own ability to notify, evacuate, and relocate its own emergency workers.

The following spring, in May 2004, a much larger FEMA-led exercise, known as FORWARD CHALLENGE, brought together upward of 2,500 federal officials from 45 different departments and agencies to test emergency preparedness procedures. The exercise began with an imagined suicide bombing on the Washington DC Metro, followed by the death of three Cabinet secretaries leaving an event at the National Press Club. Then hackers began an attack on government computers systems, air traffic control networks, and even the nation’s power grid. That evening, a person playing the president activated continuity of government measures.

A FEMA truck sits in floodwaters on the Beltway 8 feeder road in Houston, TX on August 30, 2017. THOMAS B. SHEA/Getty Images

The FORWARD CHALLENGE teams scattered across a reported 100 alternate relocation sites and spent two days running through the nation’s response to such a coordinated attack. “There has never been an exercise of this nature or of this magnitude, even during the Cold War,” bragged FEMA’s head Michael Brown, who under the new DHS reorganization served as both the FEMA chief and the DHS undersecretary for emergency preparedness and response. “Our attempt was to get people focused on plans in the event of another 9/11. You don’t want to wait until disaster hits.”

But it was clear FEMA wasn’t in good shape to respond if a disaster other than a terrorist attack hit. A July 2004 exercise, aimed at responding to a mid-level Category 3 hurricane hitting New Orleans, left agency officials fearful of how poorly FEMA had performed, and DHS budget cuts for the upcoming year left the agency unable to address many of the fixes it wanted to institute.

In the summer of 2004, a year before Hurricane Katrina, senior FEMA officials were warning that the nation’s need to restore balance between the new focus on counterterrorism and more run-of-the-mill natural disasters. “We are now letting terrorism overshadow our preparedness and response to natural disaster,” one official said. Under the Bush administration, the agency had also once again become home to a wide variety of seemingly inexperienced political appointees

One FEMA union leader complained to Congress, that “emergency managers at FEMA have been supplanted on the job by politically connected contractors and by novice employees with little background or knowledge.” FEMA itself was undergoing an identity crisis, as DHS officials tried to discourage the use of the agency’s initials and instead referred to it as EP&R, the “Emergency Preparedness and Response” directorate for DHS, and its longstanding “Federal Response Plan,” the guidebook for responding to disasters, had been replaced by a DHS-written version known as the National Response Plan that badly blurred lines of authority.

This confusions and lack of focus all came home to roost in August 2005 as Hurricane Katrina churned through the Gulf of Mexico toward New Orleans. The federal government’s response to the hurricane—combined with mistakes at the local and state government level—was an epic disaster in its own right. It triggered the strongest indictment of governmental incompetence of the 21st century. FEMA Director Michael Brown, a one-time horse breeder who lacked any emergency management experience, became a national punchline.

In the end, the only arm of the federal government with the resources, logistics, and manpower necessary to help on a massive scale—the US military—had to step in. The scenes of the swaggering, beret-wearing Lt. General Russel L. Honoré marching into New Orleans restored confidence in an incompetent-seeming national and state government. As the Army commander said himself, he tried to “present a voice of calm and reason when the politicians could not.” And his voice was backed up by hundreds of troops and heavy war materiel. “Brown was a coordinator, not a commander, and had few resources at his immediate disposal. He was a cowboy hat with no cattle,” Honoré said later.

When Barack Obama took control of the executive branch, he tried to restore some of the prestige and emphasis on competence, appointing as FEMA’s head a seasoned emergency manager, Craig Fugate.But he didn’t follow through on his campaign pledge to elevate the job to Cabinet-level. In recent years, FEMA has continued to build out its preparedness infrastructure; it now runs eight major logistics centers scattered across the country, as well as 50 additional supply caches belonging to its National Disaster Medical System and 252 pre-positioned containers of disaster supplies scattered across 14 states. It has nearly 750,000 square feet of warehouses in two locations outside Washington, DC, alone

The agency’s secret facilities continue to exist in plain sight. On its website you’ll find a fact sheet on “Mt. Weather Emergency Operations Center” that lists a lot of mundane details about its motor pool and 280-seat café but nothing about the massive underground city buried in the greenstone mountain. Instead, it offers a single throwaway line that’d be easy to overlook if you didn’t know what it really meant: “The MWEOC supports a variety of disaster response and continuity missions, mostly classified.”

At Mount Weather, where FEMA still runs regular emergency preparedness seminars and conferences, personnel and authorized visitors can gather in the Balloon Shed Lounge, a little bar in one of the aboveground buildings whose name hints at the facility’s origins as a weather station. There, officials drink beer and wine, eat popcorn, and relax with a game of foosball or pool. Upstairs, a larger cafeteria serves the facility’s masses, both permanent staff and conference attendees alike.

Today, FEMA still spends tens of millions on its continuity programs—the unclassified portion of that budget is around $50 million a year. Mount Weather, whose annual operating costs are more than $30 million a year, is in the midst of what FEMA calls “a significant infrastructure upgrade to replace old infrastructure, correct life/safety items, upgrade IT, and develop a more resilient facility capable of supporting 21st century technology and current federal departments and agencies requirements.” The modern successor to the Emergency Broadcast System, known as IPAWS, last year saw $1.5 million in upgrades for the broadcasting facilities at WLS AM-890, Chicago’s big talk radio station and one of the designated “Presidential Entry Points” for FEMA’s emergency messages. The upgrade is designed to protect the commercial station against an electromagnetic pulse. It is just one part of FEMA’s nationwide broadcast network, which it promises can “reach and communicate with over 90 percent of the US population under all operating environments.”

But it’s clear that the Trump administration isn’t necessarily giving FEMA any more respect than previous administrations: Months before Hurricane Harvey, the administration proposed a budget for DHS that included an 11 percent cut for FEMA to help pay for the border wall.

Whereas Congress recognizes the historical tradition of ethical values and principles which are the basis of
civilized society and upon which our, great Nation was founded;

Whereas these ethical values and principles have been the bedrock of society from the dawn of civilization, when they were known as the Seven Noahide Laws;

Whereas without these ethical values and principles the edifice of civilization stands in serious peril of returning to chaos; Whereas society is profoundly concerned with the recent weakening of these principles that has resulted in crises that beleaguer and threaten the fabric of civilized society; Whereas the justified preoccupation with these crises must not let the citizens of this Nation lose sight of their responsibility to transmit these historical ethical values from our distinguished past to the generations of the future;

Whereas the Lubavitch movement has fostered and promoted these ethical values and principles throughout the world; Whereas Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, leader of the Lubavitch movement, is universally respected and revered and his eighty-ninth birthday falls on March 26, 1991: Whereas in tribute to this great spiritual leader, “the rebbe”, this, his ninetieth year will be seen as one of “education and giving”, the year in which we turn to education and charity to return the world to the moral and ethical values contained in the Seven Noahide Laws: and Whereas this will be reflected in an international scroll of honor signed by the President of the United States and other heads of state: Now, therefore, be it Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatites of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That March 26, 1991, the start of the ninetieth year of Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, leader of the worldwide
Lutbavitch movement. is designated as “Education Day. U.S.A.”. The President is requested to issue a proclamation calling upon the people of the United States to observe such day with appropriate ceremonies and activities.

Made in Germany during the Weimar Period, Metropolis is set in a futuristic urban dystopia and follows the attempts of Freder, the wealthy son of the city’s master, and Maria, a saintly figure to the workers, to overcome the vast gulf separating the classes of their city, and bring the workers together with Joh Fredersen, the master of the city. The film’s message is encompassed in the final inter-title: “The Mediator Between the Head and the Hands Must Be the Heart”.

The film’s extensive running time also came in for criticism, and Metropolis was cut substantially after its German premiere, removing a large portion of Lang’s original footage. Numerous attempts have been made to restore the film since the 1970s. Music producer Giorgio Moroder released a truncated version with a soundtrack by rock artists such as Freddie Mercury, Loverboy and Adam Ant in 1984. A new reconstruction of Metropolis was shown at the Berlin Film Festival in 2001. In 2008, a damaged print of Lang’s original cut of the film was found in a museum in Argentina. After a long restoration process that required additional materials provided by a print from New Zealand, the film was 95% restored and shown on large screens in Berlin and Frankfurt simultaneously on 12 February 2010.

Plot

In the future, in the city of Metropolis, wealthy industrialists and business magnates and their top employees reign from high-rise towers, while underground-dwelling workers toil to operate the great machines that power the city. Joh Fredersen is the city’s master. His son Freder idles away his time at sports and in a pleasure garden, but is interrupted by the arrival of a young woman named Maria, who has brought a group of workers’ children to witness the lifestyle of their rich “brothers”. Maria and the children are ushered away, but Freder, fascinated, goes to the lower levels to find her. On the machine levels he witnesses the explosion of a huge machine that kills and injures numerous workers. Freder has a hallucination that the machine is Moloch, and the workers are being fed to it. When the hallucination ends and he sees the dead workers being carried away on stretchers, he hurries to tell his father about the accident; Fredersen asks his assistant, Josaphat, why he learned of the explosion from his son, and not from him.

Grot, foreman of the Heart Machine, brings to Fredersen secret maps found on the dead workers. Fredersen again asks Josaphat why he did not learn of the maps from him, and fires him. Freder secretly rebels against Fredersen by deciding to help the workers, after seeing his father’s cold indifference towards the harsh conditions they face.

Fredersen takes the maps to the inventor Rotwang to learn their meaning. Rotwang had been in love with a woman named Hel, who left him to marry Fredersen and later died giving birth to Freder. Rotwang shows Fredersen a robot he has built to “resurrect” Hel. The maps show a network of catacombs beneath Metropolis, and the two men go to investigate. They eavesdrop on a gathering of workers, including Freder. Maria addresses them, prophesying the arrival of a mediator who can bring the working and ruling classes together. Freder believes that he could fill the role and declares his love for Maria. Fredersen orders Rotwang to give Maria’s likeness to the robot so that it can ruin her reputation among the workers to prevent any rebellion. Fredersen is unaware that Rotwang plans to use the robot to kill Freder and take over Metropolis. Rotwang kidnaps Maria, transfers her likeness to the robot and sends her to Fredersen. Freder finds the two embracing and, believing it is the real Maria, falls into a prolonged delirium. Intercut with his hallucinations, the false Maria unleashes chaos throughout Metropolis, driving men to murder and stirring dissent amongst the workers.

Freder recovers and returns to the catacombs. Finding the false Maria urging the workers to rise up and destroy the machines, Freder accuses her of not being the real Maria. The workers follow the false Maria from their city to the machine rooms, leaving their children behind. They destroy the Heart Machine, which causes the workers’ city below to flood. The real Maria, having escaped from Rotwang’s house, rescues the children with the help of Freder. Grot berates the celebrating workers for abandoning their children in the flooded city. Believing their children to be dead, the hysterical workers capture the false Maria and burn her at the stake. A horrified Freder watches, not understanding the deception until the fire reveals her to be a robot. Rotwang is delusional, seeing the real Maria as his lost Hel, and he chases her to the roof of the cathedral, pursued by Freder. The two men fight as Fredersen and the workers watch from the street. Rotwang falls to his death. Freder fulfills his role as mediator by linking the hands of Fredersen and Grot to bring them together.

January 11, 2018 by Tyler Durden of Zerohedge After several decades of nation-building and trillions of dollars missing or improperly recorded, the long-awaited audit of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has finally begun. On […]

1 Comment

It is not just Christians who will be made liable to being executed under Noahide Laws, the Muslims are also all verbally identified as due to be executed by rabbis on YouTube videos as idolaters, and of course, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs and members of all other religions who worship different deities to Yahweh will also be liable to physical extermination under worldwide military Noahide Laws against so-called ‘idolaters’, around 6 billion ‘idolatrous’ souls in fact, with the remainder of Gentiles in the world who are left alive after the military imposition of Noahide Laws using subjugated NATO forces amongst others to be literally enslaved as intended in Judaic scripture, before all Gentiles in the entire world are eventually all killed and sent to hell at the end of the world according to the Zohar.

The Torah is extremely explicit, that all Gentiles are eternally Gentiles, and that all Jews are eternally Jews, and the Torah says that under no circumstances can anyone who was not once a Jew before ever be ‘converted’ to become a Jew again. I do not believe that any such thing as a righteous Gentile exists in the Jewish mind, and I think all dupes are in for a sad surprise.